The orange sparks spread like magical locusts along his limbs and torso, leaving a bare outline behind. Ghostly innards wobbled inside transparent flesh, and Garrick saw it all happen.

He opened his mouth to speak, but no sound emerged, so Riley said the words for him.

“Unto dust,” said the boy, and he spat on the floor.

For an instant Garrick flashed silver, as though transformed into thermite powder, then he was sucked down into the Timekey, which stood on its point, spinning like a top.

A bolt of lightning shot from its tip, scorching the ceiling, then it too disappeared.

“Okay,” said Chevie, grabbing Riley’s shoulder and hustling him toward the steps, “I know where this is going.”

Without an aperture at the twenty-first-century end of the wormhole, the time tunnel craved energy to sustain the matter conversion. The first things to go were the barrel batteries, which were grabbed with lightning fingers, squeezed dry, then tossed aside like dead husks. Then the lightning burrowed deep into the earth itself, siphoning geothermal energy until the soil cracked and split.

Chevie pushed Riley upstairs and toward the front door, hearing the earth itself open behind her with thunderous booms and sharp snaps. She could feel Bill Riley’s Timekey buzz sympathetically against her chest.

“Run,” she called, wholly unnecessarily. “The house is going to collapse.”

Riley did not need any urging. He raced toward the door, thinking that this was the second time he had fled this house in fear of his life.

The house collapsed around them as they ran, sinking into the basement’s maw, as the structure itself fed the wormhole with kinetic energy. Glass shattered and stone was crushed like sand. Chevie kicked Riley hard in the rump to shunt him past a falling chandelier.

Garrick had bolted the door behind him, but this didn’t delay them, as most of the front wall had collapsed. The fleeing pair dived through a hole in the wall onto the pavement and scrambled quickly from the maelstrom of destruction behind them.

Streams of people flowed from the doors of adjacent houses, and screaming and howling rose up in the square as the wormhole gulped and swallowed the entire building, excising it from its neighbors with surgical precision. When at last the dust settled and the cacophony faded, the house had been removed, like a rotten tooth from a gum, leaving the others untouched save for a score of broken windows and a spiderweb of superficial cracks.

Riley and Chevie leaned on the park railing, as caked in dust as any victims of Vesuvius, but intact and uninjured.

Riley spat a ball of brick dust to the ground. “Did you know that the entire house would be consumed?”

Chevie touched the tender spot on her chest where Garrick’s bullet had struck the body armor she had stripped from a fallen member of the hazmat team. “I knew there was a chance, but it was worth taking.”